When emergency situations such as occurrences of disasters, car accidents, crimes, etc. take place, it is not only critical to send emergency responders to emergency scenes promptly and efficiently to provide rescue efforts to the people involved in the emergency event, but it is also important to guarantee the safety of emergency vehicles (EVs) heading to the emergency scene.
Widely used means to guarantee the safety of EVs includes providing direct emergency vehicle alerts based on conventional audio or visual signaling devices such as flashing lights, sirens and/or horns. However, these conventional signaling devices may not be adequate, or may provide unnecessary alerts to vehicles which are not even on roads that the EV can travel. These alerts may also easily be ignored by people, or go unnoticed by people with hearing impairments or by distracted drivers.
Regarding these issues, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 15/958,550 discloses a method for generating a safety zone based on node data collected from emergency equipment and giving warning messages to other vehicles when they approach near the zone, the entire disclosure of which are incorporated by reference herein.
However, there has been no prior work on determining or varying a size or shape of a geofence for an EV based on a location of the EV and map information near the EV.